Maybe high school should include lessons in estimating...

...risk in alternative situations, something financial people model for clients all the time, but an idea that seems all too gut-level/hunch-involved among the general public.

Example: I place a "cost" of 100 units on getting a delta headache. The odds of getting it might be 50%--just my guesstimate in this hypothetical. So the expected value is 50 units of cost.

I place a "cost" of 100,000 units on being hospitalized with COVID. I mean, isn't that like a thousand times worse than a headache? The positivity rate among unvaccinated people in my area, say, is 5%. Would I be hospitalized if infected as an unvaccinated person? Who knows. Maybe a 5% chance of that. The expected value of this scenario is 100,000 x 5% x 5% = 250. Call it a 2% chance--now the cost is 100, still higher than the headache cost. You'd have to be confident that even if you contracted Covid, you'd have less than 1 chance in a hundred of needing to be hospitalized. Remember that scene in Dirty Harry where Harry asks, "Do ya feel lucky?" Get the shot.

Now, the inputs can make a big difference, but my point is that people don't even get close to approaching it this way. It doesn't even have to be quantified, just dichotomized--"What would you fear more, a headache from the shot or getting a breathing tube at the hospital?"

I think the plethora of scare stories might be having an effect, since they are implicitly advancing the dichotomy. They are true stories, but clearly publicized in order to have an effect on the unvaccinated akin to the intended effect of the bloody car-crash movies and slides shown to us as teens and 20-somethings back in the day (in lieu of a ticket, or to get a ticket expunged from your record).

We do. We even teach about vaccines.

And civics. And economics. And finance.

What we don't teach anymore (or at least was heavily deemphasized) is geography, cursive (go ahead and let me rant on it) and logic.

What we don't do is demand an hour of physical training to even gain entrance to the building.

We should start doing that after everybody gets vaccinated.

We should also add a course called "how to determine whether or not your internet source is bullshit." I'll leave it to the higher pay grades to come up with a better name for that class.

Call it "data literacy"

An increasingly important skill set.

I actually had a course on that in H.S.

"Mass Media and Bias" or some variation of that. I can't remember if it was my actual English one semester, or an elective. A diocesan Catholic high school.

Granted, this was 1998 before social media, but the principles would still apply.

They, and many others, also need lessons

on not being shamelessly self-interested.

From the beginning, a sub-segment has been focused only on how the pandemic affects them personally. How many times have we heard discussions about how vaccinations, masks, etc. protect not just an individual but those around them?

The problem is that the cost can be magnified. Sure, the cost of a delta headache for one person might be 100 units. But what's the societal cost if that person continues the chain of transmission. They didn't die, so no skin of their back, but what if someone downstream dies? Or, as others have mentioned in this thread, what if their behavior leads to hospitalizations which amplify the pressure on the healthcare system?

The calculus frequently boils down to "Well, if I get sick I won't die, so it doesn't matter what I do. It's up to me to decide my risk tolerance." While that may be true, it's different when decisions about your individual risk tolerance negatively influence others. Even if you could explain risk in alternative situations, I think we'd still fall short in having people appreciate risk that extends beyond the individual.

Answers may not be good for society though.

Using the same weights/math, but accounting for age…

A 65-74 year old has 6x and 95(!)x chance of hospitalization and death, respectively, as a 18-29 year old. So the result could be the young foregoing vaccination (at least for now). The young have an increased chance of symptoms from vaccination and a markedly decreased chance of Covid severe outcomes.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

Young people think they're immortal

Waaaayyyy back when I was young, I sure did.

Which is why mandates are necessary whether they like it or not.

If you want to go into bars and restaurants, indoor concerts, movies, and all that fun stuff, get your shots or you can't come in.

Unfortunately Biden can't do what Emanuel Macron did in France, but businesses can just like they did with smoking, and I hope they will.

Wait, you used to be young?

Do you have some kind of documented proof?

No one's going to believe that just because you say so.

Like George Bailey, sprack was born older *

I believe there’s a kid named sprack mentioned in the Bible. *